Culpeper placed parsley under Mercury. Its notoriously slow and erratic germination bred a rich body of folklore: the seed was said to go to the devil and back, seven or nine times, before it sprouted, so that a poor showing was the devil's tithe; and to transplant parsley, or to give a root away, was to invite misfortune or death into the house. These beliefs, and the old warning against a wife who grew parsley too well, cluster around a plant genuinely difficult to raise from seed. Alongside the funeral symbolism and the devil-lore, parsley remained the most ordinary of kitchen herbs, valued plainly for the table.
Parsley also holds a living ritual place at the Jewish Passover seder, where a green vegetable, karpas, most commonly parsley, is dipped in salt water and eaten early in the service, the green read as a sign of spring and rebirth and the salt water as the tears of slavery in Egypt, a use continuing in Jewish households today and quite distinct from the plant's older Greek association with death. The custom is attested in early rabbinic descriptions of the Passover order and remains one of the more universally kept elements of the modern seder across otherwise very different Jewish communities, a single herb once strewn on Greek tombs now marking, in an entirely different tradition, the coming of spring.